The great European capitals of North America

There are approximately 25 communities named Athens in North America. I say “approximately”, because it depends on how you count. Many of the American Athenses are unincorporated communities, and rely for their continued existence not on legal writ, but on social agreement or collective memory. Some no longer exist at all, having succumbed to the turbulence of the Western gold rush (Athens, Nevada) or given way to a series of devastating fires (Athens, Kentucky). Most are—with apologies to their residents—unremarkable. Only one North American Athens has ever made it (relatively) big: Athens, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia—a city whose population of 120,000 is pretty large for a modern-day American college town, but was surpassed by the original Athens some time around 500 BC.

The reasons these communities were named Athens have, in many cases, been lost to internet time (meaning, they can’t be easily discerned via five minutes of googling). But the modal origin story, among the surviving Athenses with reliable histories (i.e., those with a “history” section in their Wikipedia entry), is exactly what you might expect: some would-be 19th century colonialist superheroes (usually white and male) heard a few good things about some Ancient Greek gentlemen named Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and decided that the little plot of land they had just managed to secure from the governments of the United States or Canada was very much reminiscent of the hallowed grounds on which the Platonic Academy once stood. It was presumably in this spirit that the residents of Farmersville, Ontario, for instance, decided in 1888 to changed their town’s name to Athens—a move designed to honor the town’s enviable status as an emerging leader in scholastic activity, seeing as how it had succeeded in building itself both a grammar school and a high school.

It’s safe to say that none of the North American Athenses—including the front-running Georgian candidate—have quite lived up to the glory of their Greek namesake. Here, at least, is one case where statistics do not lie: if you were to place the entire global population in a (very large) urn, and randomly sample people from that urn until you picked out someone who claimed they were from a place called Athens, there would be a greater than 90% probability that the Athens in question would be located in Greece. Most other European capitals would give you a similar result. The second largest Rome in the world, as far as I can tell, is Rome, Georgia, which clocks in at 36,000 residents. Moscow, Idaho boasts 24,000 inhabitants; Amsterdam, New York has 18,000 (we’ll ignore, for purposes of the present argument, that aberration formerly known as New Amsterdam).

Of course, as with any half-baked generalization, there are some notable exceptions. A case in point: London, Ontario (“the 2nd best London in the world”). Having spent much of my youth in Ottawa, Ontario—a mere 6 hour drive away from the Ontarian London—I can attest that when someone living in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor tells you they’re “moving to London”, the inevitable follow-up question is “which one?”

London, Ontario is hardly a metropolis. Even on a good day (say, Sunday, when half of the population isn’t commuting to the Greater Toronto Area for work), its metro population is under half a million. Still, when you compare it to its nomenclatorial cousins, London, Ontario stands out as a 60-pound baboon in the room (though it isn’t the 800-pound gorilla; that honor goes to St. Petersburg, Florida). For perspective, the third biggest London in the world appears to be London, Ohio—population 10,000. I’ve visited London, Ontario, and I know quite a few people who have lived there, but I will almost certainly go my entire life without ever meeting anyone born in London, Ohio—or, for that matter, any London other than the ones in the UK and Ontario.

What about the other great European capitals? Most of them are more like Athens than London. Some of them have more imitators than others; Paris, for example, has at least 30 namesakes worldwide. In some years, Paris is the most visited city in the world, so maybe this isn’t surprising. Many people visit Paris and fall in love with the place, so perhaps it’s inevitable that a handful of very single-minded visitors should decide that if they can’t call Paris home, they can at least call home Paris. And so we have Paris, Texas (population 25,000), Paris, Tennessee (pop. 10,000), and Paris, Michigan (pop. 3,200). All three are small and relatively rural, yet each manages to proudly feature its own replica of the Eiffel Tower. (Mind you, none of these Eiffel replicas are anywhere near as large as the half-scale behemoth that looms over the Las Vegas Strip—that quintessentially American street that has about as much in common with the French capital’s roadways as Napoleon has with Flavor Flav.)

But forget the Parises; let’s talk about the Berlins. A small community named Berlin can seemingly be found in every third tree hollow or roadside ditch in the United States—a reminder that fully one in every seven Americans claim to be of German extraction. It’s easy to forget that, prior to 1900, German-language instruction was offered at hundreds of public elementary schools across the country. One unsurprising legacy of having so many Germans in the United States is that we also have a lot of German capitals. In fact, there are so many Berlins in America that quite a few states have more than one. Wisconsin has two separate towns named Berlin—one in Green Lake County (pop. 5,500), and one in Marathon County (pop. < 1,000)—as well as a New Berlin (pop. 40,000) bigger than both of the two plain old Berlins combined. Search Wikipedia for Berlin, Michigan, and you’ll stumble on a disambiguation entry that features no fewer than 4 places: Marne (formerly known as Berlin), Berlin Charter Township, Berlin Township, and Berlin Township. No, that last one isn’t a typo.

Berlin’s ability to inject itself so pervasively into the fabric of industrial-era America is all the more impressive given that, as European capitals go, Berlin is a relative newcomer on the scene. The archeological evidence only dates human habitation in Berlin’s current site along the Spree back about 900 years. But the millions of German immigrants who imported their language and culture to the North America of the 1800s were apparently not the least bit deterred by this youthfulness. It’s as if the nascent American government of the time had looked Berlin over once or twice, noticed it carrying a fake membership card to the Great European Capitals Club, and opportunistically said, listen, they’ll never give you a drink in this place–but if you just hop on a boat and paddle across this tiny ocean…

Of course, what fate giveth, it often taketh away. What the founders of many of the transplanted Berlins, Athenses, and Romes probably didn’t anticipate was the fragility of their new homes. It turns out that growing a motley collection of homesteads into a successful settlement is no easy trick–and, as the celebrity-loving parents of innumerable children have no doubt found out, having a famous namesake doesn’t always confer a protective effect. In some cases, it may be actively harmful. As a cruel example, consider Berlin, Ontario–a thriving community of around 20,000 people when the first World War broke out. But in 1916, at the height of the war, a plurality of 346 residents voted to change Berlin’s name to Kitchener–beating out other shortlisted names like Huronto, Bercana (“a mixture of Berlin and Canada”), and Hydro City. Pressured by a campaign of xenophobia, the residents of Berlin, Ontario–a perfectly ordinary Canadian city that had exactly nothing to do with Kaiser Wilhelm II‘s policies on the Continent–opted to renounce their German heritage and rename their town after the British Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener (by some accounts a fairly murderous chap in his own right).

In most cases, of course, dissolution was a far more mundane process. Much like any number of other North American settlements with less grandiose names, many of the transplanted European capitals drifted towards their demise slowly–perhaps driven by nothing more than their inhabitants’ gradual realization that the good life was to be found elsewhere–say, in Chicago, Philadelphia, or (in later years) Los Angeles. In an act of considerable understatement, the historian O.L. Baskin observed in 1880 that a certain Rome, Ohio—which, at the time of Baskin’s writing, had already been effectively deceased for several decades—”did not bear any resemblance to ancient Rome.” The town, Baskin wrote, “passed into oblivion, and like the dead, was slowly forgotten”. And since Baskin wrote these words in an 1880 volume that has been out of print for over 100 years now, for a long time, there was a non-negligible risk that any memory of a place called Rome in Morrow County, Ohio might be completely obliterated from the pages of history.

But that was before the rise of the all-seeing, ever-recording beast that is the internet—the same beast that guarantees we will collectively never forget that it rained half an inch in Lincoln, Nebraska on October 15, 1984, or who was on the cast of the 1996 edition of MTV’s Real World. Immortalized in its own Wikipedia stub, the memory of Rome, Morrow County, Ohio will probably live exactly as long as the rest of our civilization. Its real fate, it turns out, is not to pass into total oblivion, but to ride the mercurial currents of global search history, gradually but ineluctably decreasing in mind-share.

The same is probably true, to a lesser extent, of most of the other transplanted European capitals of North America. London, Ontario isn’t going anywhere, but some of the other small Athenses and Berlins of North America might. As the population of the US and Canada continues to slowly urbanize, there could conceivably come a time when the last person in Paris, MI, decides that gazing upon a 20-foot forest replica of the Eiffel Tower once a week just isn’t a good enough reason to live an hour away from the nearest Thai restaurant.

Paris, Michigan

For the time being though, these towns survive. And if you live in the US or Canada, the odds are pretty good that at least one of them is only a couple of hours drive away from you. If you’re reading this in Dallas at 10 am, you could hop in your car, drive to Paris (TX), have lunch at BurgerLand, spend the afternoon walking aimlessly around the Texan incarnation of the Eiffel Tower, and still be home well before dinner.

The way I see it, though, there’s no reason to stop there. You’re already sitting in your car and listening to podcasts; you may as well keep going, right? I mean, once you hit Paris (TX), it’s only a few more hours to Moscow (TX). Past Moscow, it’s 2 hours to Berlin–that’s practically next door. Then Praha, Buda, London, Dublin, and Rome (well, fine, “Rhome”) all quickly follow. It turns out you can string together a circular tour of no fewer than 10 European capitals in under 20 hours–all without ever leaving Texas.

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But the way I really see it, there’s no reason to stop there either. EuroTexas has its own local flavor, sure; but you can only have so much barbecue, and buy so many guns, before you start itching for something different. And taking the tour national wouldn’t be hard; there are literally hundreds of former Eurocapitals to explore. Throw in Canada–all it takes is a quick stop in Brussels, Athens, or London (Ontario)–and could easily go international. I’m not entirely ashamed to admit that, in my less lucid, more bored moments, I’ve occasionally contemplated what it would be like to set out on a really epic North AmeroEuroCapital tour. I’ve even gone so far as to break out a real, live paper map (yes, they still exist) and some multicolored markers (of the non-erasable kind, because that signals real commitment). Three months, 48 states, 200 driving hours, and, of course, no bathroom breaks… you get the picture.

Of course, these plans never make it past the idle fantasy stage. For one thing, the European capitals of North America are much farther apart than the actual European capitals; such is the geographic legacy of the so-called New World. You can drive from London, England to Paris, France in five hours (or get there in under three hours on the EuroStar), but it would take you ten times that long to get from Paris, Maine to Paris, Oregon–if you never stopped to use the bathroom.

I picture how the conversation with my wife would go:

Wife: “You want us to quit our jobs and travel around the United States indefinitely, using up all of our savings to visit some of the smallest, poorest, most rural communities in the country?”

Me: “Yes.”

Wife: “That’s a fairly unappealing proposal.”

Me: “You’re not wrong.”

And so we’ll probably never embark on a grand tour of all of the Athenses or Parises or Romes in North America. Because, if I’m being honest with myself, it’s a really stupid idea.

Instead, I’ve adopted a much less romantic, but eminently more efficient, touring strategy: I travel virtually. About once a week, for fifteen or twenty minutes, I slip on my Google Daydream, fire up Street View, and systematically work my way through one tiny North AmeroEurocapital after another. I can be in Athens, Ohio one minute and Rome, Oregon the next—with enough time in between for a pit stop in Stockholm (Wisconsin), Vienna (Michigan), or Brussels (Ontario). Admittedly, stomping around the world virtually in bulky, low-resolution goggles probably doesn’t confer quite the same connection to history that one might get by standing at dusk on a Morrow County (OH) hill that used to be Rome, or peering out into the Nevadan desert from the ruins of a mining boomtown Athens. But you know what? It ain’t half bad. I made you a small highlight reel below. Safe travels!

The Great North AmeroEuroCapital Tour — November 2017

College kids on cobblestones; downtown Athens, Ohio.

Rewind in Time; Madrid, New Mexico.

Propane and sky; Vienna Township, Gennessee County, Michigan.

Our Best Pub is Our Only Pub; Stockholm, Wisconsin.

Eiffel Tower in the off-season; Paris, Texas.

Rome was built in a day; Rome, Oregon (pictured here in its entirety).

7 thoughts on “The great European capitals of North America”

Only one North American Athens has ever made it (relatively) big: Athens, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia

So who outside the US Midwest has ever heard of the University of Georgia?
The Cramps, The B52s, R.E.M. and Devo on the other hand …

It’s safe to say that none of the North American Athenses—including the front-running Georgian candidate—have quite lived up to the glory of their Greek namesake.

Yeah?
Try dancing to Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics.

Here in Australia a Queensland town shares its name with the USA’s second largest state.
Everything’s bigger in Queensland.
But Texas, Queensland is kinda small and sleepy.
If you want your Queensland settlement to thrive you should name it after a notorious slaver. Just ask the residents of Mackay and Townsville.

Great post! My tongue-in-cheek riposte is that there’s a little confirmation bias here. Of course if you look for North American towns named after large metropolises in the Old World, you will find hamlets and burgs that look shabby compared to their namesakes. The pomposity and inflated self-importance of the aldermen who named their wide spot in the road after an ancient and venerable cradle of civilization is laughable. But what if you worked the other way around? Try comparing Boston, Massachusetts (population 673,184) with Boston, Lincolnshire (population 35,124). Or what about Portland, Oregon (583,776) versus the 12,400 people eking out an existence on its namesake, the Isle of Portland? If we are counting “New”s, you could also have Orleans and New Orleans duke it out. New Hampshire, not known as a huge population center, even compares roughly in population to the original Hampshire (1,334,795 souls versus 1,829,500)! (Note: I got population estimates from wikipedia.)